Louder Than Bells
by Midnight Isn't
Summary: Time misbehaved before her eyes, and behind them. (A little vignette speculating on Elaida's youth, and the then-sane decisions that might have put her on the garden path to madness.)


Some things, she just kept to herself out of necessity.

She never _had_ been able to explain; admittedly, she'd only really tried once.

Yet it had never been complicated at all. In some moments, time misbehaved before her eyes, and behind them. The place her feet rested, or the chair she happened to be sitting in, began to tremble like a bittern string, and the motion of her blood carried up to her tongue like a flavour. With nothing to swallow, her throat would clench, and her vocal folds - was that the term? She'd never paid much attention to the lectures Yellow sisters gave - but they would push back, and words would slip out. They would continue until the pressure stopped - the pressure of a hundred windy years, after all, on a spinning world; wind thick with dust and rain. The sprouting and fall of leaves sped into a worldwide, colourshifting avalanche, and their crackling and trembling rang louder than the bells of the White Tower.

At first, breathing meant forgetting what the words had been; that amnesia had meant hoping no one who had witnessed those moments would do other than delight in her gift, as well as, ideally, repeat what she'd said back with some level of accuracy.

It had been Meidani who - seeing such a fit for the first time, and terrified by it - managed, completely by mistake, to trap her in the interstitial breaths just long enough to commit her own foretellings to memory. Somehow, her arm wrapping around Elaida's shoulder had interfered with the moment - unbalanced her, tied her by one limb so she had to spin in the winds, see both what would be and what had been - how she'd walked into the Tower garden, and the moment she'd reached to pull a withering petal from what would have been a perfect rose without it - and the moment then, Meidani and a shifting, an intensification of shadow as a cloud released the sun.  
The words from the ground, the backward and awkward echoes, softened, to a whisper, and stopped as one white-clad girl looked into the other's now-glassy eyes.

That wasn't when she'd tried to explain things to Meidani, but the other girl had walked Elaida back to her room, supporting her, promising not to tell, asking if she wanted company, saying she could probably get out of chores after Last. Dizzy, paradoxically, from her new sense of control, and seeing a clue in the other girl's face that she knew she might confirm that night, longing for the possibility of rapid gratification so absent from what her Talent offered - she had said yes, thank you.

She had tried to explain some weeks later - because Meidani had asked, in fact, with her hand set on Elaida's shoulder and her face sinking into the pillow, waning gibbous. And Elaida had been happy at the moment, so she tried.

She'd been exhilarated, really, all evening. Time had misbehaved again at supper, right there at the long tables, and she had (she thought. And still believed years later, when she thought about it, desperate for the faint memory) foretold the destruction of the Black Ajah. Not with those words - and lucky, that, no Novice would get off clean saying those words - but serpents wrapping around the Tower, tumbling down the shining walls in the night, shedding scales like petals - it couldn't mean much else. Her foretelling, kept in her throat and to her own knowledge, and something she could interpret on her own.

Meidani had brought her a rose, slightly bruised. It reminded her of the foretelling, and (faintly) of how they'd learned _saidar_; reminded her how her power and her Talent were similar, yet not at all the same, and maybe it was on those thoughts her tongue tripped up, trying to make Meidani comprehend it.

Meidani didn't understand, though, and dozed off fairly soon once Elaida finally gave up.

That was fine.

Some things couldn't really be shared.

Maybe some things - secrets and certainties - didn't derive their power from exposure or dissection. They could only be bent or bruised, losing their power, dissipating in the currents of dissent or disagreement.

It was an uncomfortable thought, but only until she let it settle through her throat, down her arms and into the door to Meidani's room as she closed it quietly behind her. In time (some uneven, tapering time after that night), she came to see it as a foregone conclusion.

Some things, she simply kept to herself. She'd do well enough, do better, without advice.

Advice was only interference.


End file.
